Firefox gets faster on Linux

Linux users have always been a big part of Firefox‘s vocal fan base, and today a group of Mozilla developers has repaid their devotion with some good news. Mozilla’s Mike Hommey reported this morning that his team of coders finally managed to get both 32 and 64-bit Firefox builds for Linux to compile with GCC 4.5. The updated compiler has been available since April 2010, but Hommey’s team tried twice last year without success to make the switch. Now that they’ve been able to pull it off, Firefox on Linux should perform every bit as well as it does on Windows — with the possible exception of hardware acceleration, where Firefox’s utilization of Direct2D still gives Windows Vista and 7 a performance edge.

Hommey also states that users of older Linux OSes should now be able to use the GCC 4.5 compiled builds, so long as they include the GNU standard C++ library from GCC 4.1.

If you’re wondering when the changes will arrive in your stable Firefox build, it’s going to be a few months. Hommey’s blog post says they’re targetting Firefox 6, and Firefox 5 is set to be released on June 21st. Based on Mozilla’s new release schedule, that should mean the new Linux build should go stable sometime this fall.